Lot 164

Ota Janeček (1919 - 1996) BLOOMING TREES

Ota Janeček was active in many artistic disciplines. In addition to his remarkable work as a painter, he also left his mark in sculpture, drawing and graphic art, as well as his extremely extensive work as an illustrator and in applied art and film. He first studied drawing at the Prague Technical School under Cyril Bouda and Oldřich Blažíček, then continued at the Academy of Arts and Crafts in the studios of František Kysela and Josef Novák. His early work focused on figurative subjects and still lifes, in which he developed the artistic innovations of the first half of the 20th century, especially Cubism and Expressionism. A noticeable change came in the late 1940s, when he turned his attention to nature in small and large, while lyricism and a kindly vision of the world became the main ingredients of his distinctive and easily recognizable style. The present painting, Trees in Spring, dated 1951-1952, shows two seemingly disparate approaches to the subject: on the one hand, a naturalistic landscape with a solitary figure of a countrywoman in the middle ground, and on the other, a group of flowering trees in the foreground that form a separate organism with their dramatically intertwined branches. Taken as a whole, this interpretation of seen reality loosely recalls the magical romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich.